Others from the home’s smart alarm systems, Facebook, cellphones, email and a key fob allowed police to re-create a nearly minute-by-minute account of the morning that they said revealed Rich…
By Justin Jouvenal | Washington Post
The firefighter found Richard Dabate on the floor of his kitchen, where he had made a desperate 911 call minutes earlier, court records show. Bleeding and lashed to a chair with zip ties, the man moaned a chilling warning: “They’re still in the house.”
Smoke hung in the air, and a trail of blood led to a darkened basement, as Connecticut State Police swarmed the large home in the Hartford suburbs two days before Christmas in 2015.
Richard, 41, told authorities a masked intruder with a “Vin Diesel” voice killed his wife, Connie, in front of him and tortured him. Police combed the home and town of Ellington but found no suspect.
With no witnesses other than Richard Dabate, detectives turned to the vast array of data and sensors that increasingly surround us. An important bit of evidence came from an unlikely source: the Fitbit tracking Connie’s movements.
Others from the home’s smart alarm systems, Facebook, cellphones, email and a key fob allowed police to re-create a nearly minute-by-minute account of the morning that they said revealed Richard’s story was an elaborately staged fiction.
Undone by his data, Richard was charged with his wife’s murder. He has pleaded not guilty.
The case, which is in pretrial motions, is perhaps the best example to date of how Internet-connected, data-collecting smart devices such as fitness trackers, digital home assistants, thermostats, TVs and even pill bottles are beginning to transform criminal justice.
The ubiquitous devices can serve as a legion of witnesses, capturing our every move, biometrics and what we have ingested. They sometimes listen in or watch us in the privacy of our homes. And police are increasingly looking to the devices for clues.
The prospect has alarmed privacy advocates, who say too many consumers are unaware of the revealing information these devices are harvesting. They also point out there are few laws specifically crafted to guide how law enforcement officials collect smart-device data.
Andrew Ferguson, a University of the District of Columbia law professor, says we are entering an era of “sensorveillance” when we can expect one device or another to be monitoring us much of the time. The title of a law paper on the topic put the prospect this way: “Technology is Killing Our Opportunity to Lie.”
The business research company Gartner estimates 8.4 billion devices were connected to the internet in 2017, a 31 percent increase over the previous year. By 2020, the company estimates there will be roughly three smart devices for every person on the planet.
“Americans are just waking up to the fact that their smart devices are going to snitch on them,” Ferguson said. “And that they are going to reveal intimate details about their lives they did not intend law enforcement to have.”
Dark, tangled past kept secret
The Dabates’ yellow Colonial was festively decorated with wreaths on the windows the morning of Dec. 23,2015. Richard, Connie and their two boys, ages 6 and 9, bustled around getting ready for the day.
To many of their acquaintances, the family appeared to be an ordinary one in a quiet bedroom community. Richard was a network administrator, and Connie worked as a pharmaceutical sales representative.
Joann Knapp, a former neighbor of the Dabates, fondly recalls Connie popping over to her house to ask her out for walks while Knapp was having a difficult pregnancy. Knapp said Connie and Richard appeared to have a happy – even passionate – marriage.
“They couldn’t keep their eyes off each other,” Knapp said. “It was a look that you would want.”
But behind that public face, Connie’s killing would reveal a darkly tangled relationship and a major secret.
Richard and his attorney did not respond to requests for comment. Richard gave a detailed – but shifting – account of Connie’s killing to detectives over six hours on the day of the slaying. It is contained in his arrest warrant.
On the drive to work that morning, Richard said, he got an alert on his phone that the home’s alarm had been triggered. He said he shot an email to his boss and returned home, arriving there between 8:45 a.m. and 9 a.m.
Richard told police he heard a noise on the second floor and found a hulking intruder wearing camouflage and a mask inside the walk-in closet of the master bedroom. The intruder demanded his wallet at knifepoint.
Soon after, Connie returned home from an exercise class; Richard told investigators he yelled at her to run. Connie fled into the basement, and the intruder followed.
When Richard arrived on the lower level, he made his way through darkness, finding the man pointing a gun at Connie’s head. Richard said that the gun was his own and that Connie must have removed it from a safe to defend herself.
Richard said he charged but heard a deafening blast and fell. When he got up, Connie was slumped on the ground. Police would later determine the gunshot hit her in the back of her head.
The intruder disabled Richard and then zip-tied one of Richard’s arms and one of his legs to a folding chair, according to the account.
The intruder jabbed Richard with a box cutter. The man also started a fire in a cardboard box using a blow torch, which he then turned on Richard’s ankle.
Richard told investigators he saw an opening: He jammed the blow torch in the man’s face and singed it. The intruder ran out.
Richard said he crawled upstairs with the chair still attached, activated the panic alarm, called 911 and collapsed. The firefighter found him soon after.
‘Like a frickin’ soap opera’
The chaotic scene inside the Dabate home had all the hallmarks of a home invasion, but a few details would prompt investigators to take a closer look.
Dogs brought in to track the suspect could find no scent trails leaving the property and circled back to Richard, according to arrest records. Richard also aroused suspicion when detectives asked whether their probe would reveal any problems between him and Connie.
He took a deep breath and offered: “Yes and no.”
Richard told a bizarre story. He said that he had gotten a high school friend pregnant and that it was Connie’s idea. He said the three planned to co-parent the child, since his wife wanted another baby but could not have one for health reasons.
Later, Richard changed his story, saying that the pregnancy was unplanned and that he had a romantic relationship with the friend. Detectives found no evidence Connie knew of the pregnancy.
“This situation popped up like a frickin’ soap opera,” Richard told detectives.
The admission pointed toward a possible motive for Connie’s killing, but it would be the data detectives uncovered that would give them evidence to conclude his story was a lie.
Detectives had noticed Connie was wearing a Fitbit when they found her body.
They requested the device’s data, which showed she had walked 1,217 feet after returning home from the exercise class, far more than the 125 feet it would take her to go from the car in the garage to the basement in Richard’s telling of what happened.
The Fitbit also registered Connie moving roughly an hour after Richard said she was killed before 9:10 a.m. Facebook records also cast doubt on Richard’s timeline, showing Connie had posted as late as 9:46 a.m.
Detectives would also come to doubt that Richard left home that morning, after examining data from his home alarm system and his email account.
Records indicate he used a key fob to activate his home alarm from his basement at 8:50 a.m. and then disabled it at 8:59 a.
